remember the magnus bots?
in jan 2024 the bots of the month were magnus themed, inspired by the chess player magnus carlsen. here are my notes on the games i played with them, which have been waiting unpublished for a year. its giving me nostalgia.
they each have their own quips and dialogue written in. i would guess its not particularly true to the real player cuz its pretty silly, but i dont know the guy. maybe hes into puns, cant fault that.
make ur bets now on how many i managed to beat, before moving on to my notes below:
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1. sleeping magnus (500)
i thought sleeping magnus would be easy, so i played fast (for me). i wanted to try out a d4 opening for the first time, but i didnt get far before sleepy magnus threw free pieces at me, ruining my opening.
it was a careless and uninteresting game, with blunders for all.
i thought there should be a way to checkmate with just a knight and bishop, if ur careful. but i wasnt finding it so i gave up and promoted into checkmate.
2. ski magnus (1000)
my first game with ski magnus i lost. i was still going for fast and loose, and trying out a new opening.
i am not good at fast. or new things. but ski magnus did his best to cheer me up with seasonally appropriate puns
it was not a good game. dont look at it, its just here for my notes.
the second game i tried to be slightly better, but still not overthink things. i blundered less and won, but it was still full of mistakes i wouldnt have made if i were being slow.
3. soccer magnus (1500)
in my first game against soccer magnus, i forgot en passant exists. again.
i have never, once, remembered en passant exists while in a game. i think next game i will just spend the whole time chanting “en passant. en passant. en passant.”
i didnt bother to play too careful after that, but played out the game anyway.
2nd game i was feeling good as i developed and expanded. i liked my position, but then wasnt sure how to start breaking through.
as the middlegame exploded, it felt like there were a million attacks on every move and i started to get tired of calculating everything. i knew this was a mistake when i made it, but i just wanted to get the annoying knights off my back:
heres the move where i basically lost the game. i just didnt see that the knight was within checking distance:
at soccer magnus level, the bot definitely knows how to make some decent moves. so i was going to have to make fewer mistakes.
so tues was a loss. wed i blundered into a draw on the last move, which i talked about in a post about my first draw. and then today thurs i beat soccer magnus.
im still trying to learn what queens gambit is. so in my first game i lost when i was trying to force the opening into queens gambit but soccer magnus did not play along. the review was very unimpressed with my opening.
luckily in my second game soccer magnus went for queens gambit himself, so at least i got to play it from the other side.
in this game i got to really test whether a queen is worth as much as three minor pieces. it felt really iffy in there for a bit.
heres where i knew my opponent had made an error and i was about to make a great move:
heres a miss where it took me a minute in review to understand why it was a miss:
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this is where my notes end. what i remember of the dialogue for soccer magnus was being bewildered by an unending stream of names that i assume were of soccer players. this tactic was obviously a winning one for soccer magnus, cuz otherwise how do u explain how many games it took for me to find a win?
i had meant to at least try chef magnus (2000) and magnus magnus (2882). if nothing else, to be subjected to the dialogue the chess.com people programmed in.
i hope this brought u some nostalgia for times past! happy 2025.
